I picked up David Bowie’s latest, Blackstar, on Friday—the day of its release—and the missus and I spent the better part of the weekend listening to the “unpredictable jazz solos and spirited vocals meeting timeless stories of blunt force and destruction,” as Ryan Dombal described it in his Pitchfork review, published last week.
Of course, the listening experience went from the sublime to the surreal when we learned of Bowie’s death this morning, particularly in light of lyrics like:
Look up here, I’m in heaven
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen
I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen
Everybody knows me now
Much will be written about Bowie over the next few days—most of it, I imagine, about how he left such an indelible mark not only on music, but also on fashion and art. (On that, in fact, Dombal was eerily prescient. “[The] tortured immortality is no gimmick,” he wrote. “Bowie will live on long after the man has died.”)
But for me, it’s always been about the music: exploratory, enigmatic, and transgressive. And beautiful—always beautiful.
There will never be another quite like David Bowie. There can’t be.
